Category Archives: Picture Books

I’ve been trying to be better about utilizing my Facebook pages. It’s been easy lately, what with “Wanda Won’t” out now (and available on my Amazon page for only…! etc.). I just make inane videos and post the second or third take that I can stand, because who wants to waste time looking professional?

I read the entire book to a fake audience and posted it to my business page. It actually clocks in just under a minute and a half, which should tell you exactly how much shorter this picture book is than my usual fare. The best part happens right about at the minute mark, when I start describing the illustration like I’m reading to a two-year old with the corresponding attention span. Habits die hard.

$6.99 on Amazon. Visit https://www.amazon.com/Wanda-Wont-Andrea-Schultz/dp/1981367926/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8.(Also, you can tell I'm used to reading with kids when about halfway through the story I start narrating what's happening in the picture. I stopped myself after the one page, and decided to eat lunch instead of re-recording.)

There’s an even shorter version on my personal page. Here’s 17 seconds of “Wanda Won’t: An Interpretive Dance.”

That moment when you realize your thumbs-up is out of the frame. I feel like I should have added royalty-free music to this; in lieu of that, imagine the "Chariots of Fire" theme, in celebration that my copy of "Wanda Won't" came in the mail two weeks earlier than promised.To purchase, visit https://www.amazon.com/Wanda-Wont-Andrea-Schultz/dp/1981367926/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8.

A flash drive actually ate all of my picture files for this latest book project. Fortunately, it did so half a day after I uploaded the entire book to CreateSpace, so I’m not nearly as devastated as I could be. The book has since migrated from the actual print-on-demand company to Amazon, where it is now wallowing in fame and glory. In other words:

In fact, ALL of my currently available picture books cost $6.99. I’m running a Christmas sale through the month of December, so get your copies now!!! On January 1st I’ll jack the price back up again, so get ’em while they’re hot.

For the first time in my life I went with a first-take. Why? Because I am unprofessional, that's why. And now with that resounding endorsement out of the way, to buy a copy of "Wanda Won't" for $6.99, go here: https://www.amazon.com/Wanda-Wont-Andrea-Schultz/dp/1981367926/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8.To see every one of my picture books in one convenient place (all three of which are currently $6.99 through the month of December), here's my Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.com/A.L.-Schultz/e/B06Y4DCPS1.

“The Bump Under the Bed” has officially made it onto my Amazon page, where you can buy it for $10.99. Also, after downloading a plugin for this website that helps to compress images and clear up some space in my media file storage, I tried to upload my marketing video again only to discover that I have poor reading comprehension. The site won’t allow me to upload any files larger than a certain size, so it doesn’t matter how much space I clear out of my media storage. Three minutes and sixteen seconds is simply too long. However, if you’re just dying to watch me make faces while I read, you can go here:

Amazon page for "The Bump Under the Bed" can be found here:https://www.amazon.com/Bump-Under-Bed-Andrea-Schultz/dp/1974068927/ref=la_B06Y4DCPS1_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1503589464&sr=1-3Hopefully that links properly. If you're interested in my amazon author page (which has all three of my available products for sale in one handy place – oh boy!), you can go to:amazon.com/author/alschultz

Oh my goodness, I had no idea I could actually link this video right onto my page. Apparently I’ve accidentally discovered a method for sharing my videos on my website without eating too much space. In related news, that is a really goofy screen capture my video decided to use as my cover image.

Finally, if you’re either my brother, sister, or parents that automatically qualifies your family unit for one free copy of “The Bump Under the Bed,” though I’m having difficulty figuring out how to get it to you. My Createspace account wants to send it to the address here in Montana, but it won’t make it before I move, unless I spend exorbitant amounts of money to expedite the shipping. If you are my brother*, sister, or parents, you know we don’t spend exorbitant amounts of money for convenience’s sake. Back to the drawing board.

*Insignificant note here: on my fifth editing read-through before posting, I finally noticed that I’d written “bother, sister, or parents” (italics added for emphasis), which is actually not a bad interpretation of that particular family role.

The proof copy of “The Bump Under the Bed” came in the mail today, and between the eight hundred takes of my advertisement video and a sudden realization that the title of my picture book is off center, this is the closest I have to new content for today’s update:

Last week, my patient had his leg chopped off by a man with a soldering iron.

This week, my patient slept.

A lot.

I’m getting that vague “nursing isn’t all glamor and heroics” vibe that has me shuddering and bunkering down with a pathophysiology book. By Mosby, if there isn’t more going on in my medication handbook than there is in my patient’s room. Arlo and I kill an hour by looking up the hundred and one medications our patients are on and snickering over some of the more amusing symptoms. Which strikes me as vaguely inappropriate, but I’ve done quite a bit worse that giggle over the word “impotence.” I’m really far too old for that to be funny, but then I’ll probably never really grow up.

I lurk around my patient’s door waiting for her to blink, or shift even, prepared to swoop in and take advantage of the consciousness presented me. But she proves very nearly as stubborn as Mr. I’m-Sleeping-I-Swear from two weeks ago, but with the added obstacle that she’s not faking it. Curse her, because she’s friendly when I talk to her, which makes badgering her about her current sexual activity something I actually have to use tact on.

She’s fortunate enough to fall asleep before I get to that particular question. I’ve never been very delicate in wording, and my personal strategies tend to run along the lines of “umm…so…uh….you used to be married, yeah? But you’re not anymore? So, uh, are you…um…sexually active?”

I’ve only gotten one “yes” so far, and I’m pretty sure my patient was quite gleefully waiting for me to ask.

Though I may not be full of tact, I’m full of sympathy, and the keen ability to sense when it’s time to throw in the towel. She’s tired, struggling to keep her eyes open, and tomorrow is another day to keep trying. I’ll be successful. I’m determined to, which accounts for more in my life than I can say.

6:30am the next day I peak my head in the door, just to check in on her. I have to look twice, because the kind, fifty- year-old black woman from yesterday has somehow turned into a large white man who badly needs to readjust his hospital gown.

I flick through the chart as though it will explain how Renown has mastered transmogrification, then remember that my patient was hopefully going to be transferred to telemetry ASAP to monitor her heart. I remember, because I’d been counting on transfer to be their normally punctual selves.

The word I think in my head is not nice, nor appropriate, for my clinical instructor to read.

It evens out in the end. Amputation guy, for taking as long as another clinical day, has earned me a day off. I take it, pretending to sulk because my patient has left with few of my questions answered.

As often as I manage to talk about myself on this blog, I tend not to actually say much. I’m not shy about the minutiae of my life (small details are where all the best jokes hide), but today I’ll add a major development in my life to the mix: this morning I accepted a job offer to Fort Wayne, IN, to begin September 1st. The official title going on any business cards is “Marketing Specialist,” but what it means is that I get to write for the Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, which is a pretty fantastic way to use my skills for the Church.

But what does this mean?* As my four watchers know, I took off the summer to work on my writing projects. It’s allowed me to work on my second picture book, the novel that’s still barely started, and my website — but even better, it’s helped me establish some good writing habits. Jumping back into a forty hour work week will take a significant bite out of all that time I wasn’t making money, but I already know I’ll be able to keep up with my picture book schedule, though novel writing will continue to creep forward at a snail’s pace**.

The only change anyone around here should notice is a slowdown on blog updates. I’m going to drop from two posts a week down to one, with updates probably going up on Monday. As short as I keep some of these blog posts, they still take a significant amount of time. I can write an update in half an hour, but the length of time that goes into each of these is closer to two hours. I’d like to save that time for other projects.

The other train leaving the platform on September 1st is”The BUMP Under the Bed.” I’m actually ahead of schedule, as I should be putting in an order for my first proof copy tomorrow. It’ll take a couple of weeks to get here, which gives me time for one more proof copy if I need to make any changes.

There was a boy named Hardy Hugh
Who heard such sounds at night,
Loud thumps and BUMPS beneath the bed
Once Mom turned off the light.
Until the night he looked below
To see what it could be…
And do you know what Hardy found?
Well. Look inside and see.

I nearly managed to skip today’s post, but if you’re in Mountain Time I’m coming in right under the wire for my Thursday update. I blame meddling kids entirely, because my sister’s got three of them and they’re all here visiting. Add my brother’s daughter (they live here so we get to see them everyday too), and that’s four kids four and under. Yea, verily, that’s also four excuses not to get around to my blog post today. I decided to get around to it anyways.

Unfortunately, I have very little to say. Fortunately, a picture is worth a thousand words:

Marker coloring is officially done for “The Bump Under the Bed” (though you can actually see a tree I missed in the bottom right corner of one of the pages – though that’s officially rectified at this point). Since this picture was taken I’ve hunted down a paper cutter at the public library, chopped off the borders, cut these in half for easier scanning and editing, and scanned them into my computer. Next step is to use my art program to clean up any mistakes and fill in the grays of the background. Most of this book takes place in the dark, and I decided to try and save ink, money, and time by using Clip Studio to do the boring shades. I hope to have all the text placed by the end of the month as well, with the book ready to go to the printers for the first draft proof copy by the first week of August. But once more with feeling:

MEDDLING KIDS.

I say this with love, if in all capitals. The good news is that I’m a week ahead of schedule, which gives me a few extra days to fritter away. I may even skip Monday’s update and just wait until I have at least the title page ready to show off. Like zoinks.

Montana in July, anyone? Oofta, I’m tired of it being 80 degrees by ten in the morning. I can hear my relatives in Arizona laughing at me from here, but to a Montanan this is the closest thing we have to a death sentence. We’re used to the temperature dropping back into the 50s at night, which it has not been. Worse, because it’s so hot so early in the summer, there’s a good chance we’ll spend the next three months or so on fire – or at least under a heavy pall of smoke. Hopefully rain will break the heatwave soon.

(We actually did have a little hail earlier today, but it didn’t last long enough. There’s still an unholy haze sitting along the horizon, but it doesn’t look near promising enough.)

Sketches and inks for “The Bump Under the Bed” are done! Huzzah! This is an artful representation of what my work space looks like when I’m trying to set up promo shots of all the work I’ve done:

I’m officially taking a break from illustrating for a day, but I’ll be hitting up ye olde Prismacolor markers tomorrow. Yesterday at lunch I actually put together a list for the order in which I plan to color things – beginning with skin tone, then moving on to hair, clothes, bed sheets, and on through the bedroom carpet – because there’s nothing like illustrating assembly-line style to really take the emotional thrill out of coloring. Boy oh boy, I love my job.

This update is going up much later than planned – also, it’s more boring. My two excellent excuses are: 1.) the internet at the public library was down this morning, and 2.) that even with the extra allotted time from the internet fail, I still didn’t manage to finish the short story I’ve been wanting to complete and post since March.

(Blog tip #5,491: Always start with your justifications, and never offer any apologies. In other news, I’m sorry about this.)

I wasted some time scouring through my old homework from college, but I just cannot convince myself that any of the old short story assignments I have are worth posting. They’re okay, but they’re just not good enough. This collection is meant to showcase the writing I actually want to share with people. As it turns out, I really have gotten better since University. Annoying, but a comfort in its own way.

Still, what I’d really like to do is finish up the many short stories in my head; partly so that I’ll have something to show off and put to use on my nefarious marketing scheme website, partly because it would be a relief to remove them from my head where they’re taking up the space I should be using for newer (and potentially more lucrative) projects. Unfortunately, I have a very bad habit of stretching out short stories into semi-long ones, and though that allows me to create serial pieces, it also means it takes that much more time to complete them. I waste a lot of time trying to think around my desire to flesh out my ideas as fully as I’d like. Which will never work and, honestly, if I just wrote instead of thinking about getting around to it eventually, I’d have a lot more to show for it. Ah well. One of the things I’m working on this summer.

Jumping ship from that topic (transitions are hard), I’d like to take this opportunity to throw up (gross) a shout-out and related thank you to Mary Moerbe at “Meet, Write, & Salutary.” She’s a Lutheran wife and mother whose own time for writing has shrunk (that whole mother thing does it, I think), and so has taken it on as her mission to use her blog to encourage other Lutheran writers (or perhaps writers who happen to be Lutheran, as is more my case) instead. She wrote an awesome post about “The Hatastrophe” as well as “Small Town Super Nobody,” which you can read here:

I also took the opportunity to work on my art portfolio. I’ve created galleries for several projects, and if you would like to admire all of the illustrations for “The Hatastrophe” you may do so at your pleasure, by hopping over here to my “Art Portfolio” page. The print copy of the picture book has a border frame around each illustration (as well as, you know, words), but these are the graphics on their own. I meant to put together a “For Sale” tab this afternoon as well – as a place to gather everything I’m selling (only two projects so far, but I should have a couple more by time the summer is over) – but I’ll have to do that another day. It took me two hours just to organize the art portfolio tab into something worth looking at, and I’m officially late for dinner at my brother and sister-in-law’s house. On my way, guys!

So the lie here is that it’s available through Amazon. It’s not yet, because it takes CreateSpace (an Amazon company that provides print-on-demand services) 3 – 5 business days to make the title available through Amazon.com. Which I found out this morning when I officially approved of the proof copy they sent to me yesterday, after I made this video. However, you can – if you’re absolutely dying for the chance to send me money ASAP – buy a copy through the CreateSpace website itself. Hooray! I’m not sure if you can qualify for free shipping through the subsidiary, but here’s the link anyways:

As soon as I receive word that it’s listed on Amazon, I’ll post a link to “The Hatastrophe,” either later this week or early next. In the meantime, you can admire this absurd video and politely golf-clap my efforts.